We had a change of plan today as well

I got to Liz and Terry's at lunchtime and after a quick butty Terry and I hit the road to Ambert to see this dumper. But we didn't go any further than Les Ancizes.

We started to talk about the pros and cons of having a dumper as opposed to a large powered barrow. While a dumper can carry much more soil around, when you consider what a mini-digger can excavate, then rapidly filling a dumper to capacity isn't going to be much of an issue. There are several other things that might be an issue, namely -
i)  trying to manoeuvre a dumper around the kind of tight spaces that you might expect to encounter on building projects around here - the very reason why we went for a mini-digger in the first place
ii) if you are going out to a site you will need to make two trips, namely one to move the digger and a second to fetch the dumper. With a powered barrow, the barrow will go into the back of the van and so you only make one trip;

With a few other discussions along these lines, we decided that maybe a dumper wasn't quite what we wanted and so we did a U turn and went back.

Browsing around the internet for powered barrows we became distracted and it seems that I have spent some more money that I can't really afford. The old in-car DVD player that I use to watch DVDs in here is slowly giving up the ghost. The battery failed ages ago and now it's being very selective about what DVDs it plays. But there on the internet on sale was an AKAI 12-volt TV with build-in DVD player (the new generation DVDs as well), Freeview TV box, 15-inch screen and loads of other bells and whistles and all for ... gulp ... £214. And with all of that, it draws less that 20 watts. I spend a lot of time watching DVDs and I reckon that I ought to have something decent to watch them on without straining my eyes on a tiny 7-inch screen. Not only that, I didn't buy myself a birthday present last month.

Once we'd done the internet bit we went outside (it was a gorgeous day) and did bits and pieces in Liz's garden, and I swapped the tyres over on her car from winter tyres to summer tyres (just you watch the snowstorm now). Well, it was better than me singing for my supper, and the tea was beautiful as usual.

This morning though, I did some work on my web pages for the journey to Canada last autumn. First time since 6th of January. I've loads of other things to do as you know, but I wanted to do something on these pages as a gesture of recommencement.

Tomorrow I have to write four or five radio programmes. That will keep me out of mischief.